Keeping the BUSINESS Alive

It is a talent to be able to weave numbers into an interesting read. I have read in an article that readers tend to read through a sentence which contains numbers and statistical results without thorough comprehension. This just shows how important it is to capture your reader's attention. A reader's attention is much more easily diverted when an article is too wordy or in a business article's case, focused on statistics, percentage and ratios. It takes creativity and proper word usage to lure readers back into your writing.

The Philippines' Wealthiest was an interesting article because it focused on an interesting topic. It was an example of a business article that need not exude much creativity and play of writing techniques because it is interesting in itself. But what if you are focusing on a topic that is not really as interesting as the Forbes' list of wealthy men? A writer of a good business article must learn to focus on a particular angle of a seemingly boring topic and capitalize on it to write his article.

Not many journalists are too keen on keeping the business on business writing up and alive. I have read too many feature articles and news stories but only a few, short business articles. What does it take to keep the business alive? Donald Reynolds gave one important idea as to why journalists must consider business and economy another field to write about.

If companies' books are deceptive, if analysts are compromised, if mutual funds are sneaky, if the Securities and Exchange Commission is undermanned, who'll protect the public? Maybe the press.

Here, we see the importance of writing about the economy, business and stocks. It is the journalist's task to keep the public informed on news and stories of human interest and the economy is one broad topic that the public needs to be informed about.

A Distorted Image

We are back in the limelight.

The hostage-taking incident last Monday showed the weaknesses of the PNP and the media. The incident could have been peaceful if the MPD conducted negotiations with dismissed captain Mendoza. The hostages could not have been exposed to the trauma of the incident for 12 hours if the MPD assured Mendoza that he can be reinstated in the PNP. Mendoza was not asking for too much. He was only asking for a single piece of paper from the Ombudsman to be reinstated.

The SWAT team obviously lacked training. They somehow forgot that they were dealing with a man who is probably as skilled as they were. They should have calculated the possible moves of Mendoza to disarm him.

The local government should be taking a lesson on good governance. When a sudden incident like this happens, they should secure the area. No civilians can go inside a crime scene. When a civilian was accidentally wounded, they should have started to close the area to prevent another accident to happen.

The media forgot their code of ethics. As a media practitioner, you must know what and what not to take footages of. The live coverage of the incident was obstruction to justice. The media should know when to cross the borderline. Their coverage on the capture of Mendoza’s brother only aggravated the tension inside the bus.

President Noynoy was himself a picture of his government’s passivity in incidents like this. His statements were all too late to alleviate the battered image of the Philippines. This is a test of his governance and ability to rule. His passive attitude towards this incident somehow sends a message across. He is a raw leader in need of more exposure to national threats and issues.

One hostage-taking incident proved to be enough to distort our country’s image. The hostage-taking incident was not the fault of Rolando Mendoza alone. The unskilled hands of the SWAT team and the MPD should also carry half the burden of betraying the Philippines’ image in the international limelight. The media’s obstruction of justice in the immediate scene only made matters worse.

This is one incident the world will find hard to forget. It was a showcase of a media too unethical and a government’s ineffective governance.

A Distorted Image

We are back on the limelight.

The hostage-taking incident last Monday showed the weaknesses of the PNP and the media. The incident could have been peaceful if the MPD conducted negotiations with dismissed captain Mendoza. The hostages could not have been exposed to the trauma of the incident for 12 hours if the MPD assured Mendoza that he can be reinstated in the PNP. Mendoza was not asking for too much. He was only asking for a single piece of paper from the Ombudsman to be reinstated.

The SWAT team obviously lacked training. They somehow forgot that they were dealing with a man who is probably as skilled as they were. They should have calculated the possible moves of Mendoza to disarm him.

The local government should be taking a lesson on good governance. When a sudden incident like this happens, they should secure the area. No civilians can go inside a crime scene. When a civilian was accidentally wounded, they should have started to close the area to prevent another accident to happen.

The media forgot their code of ethics. As a media practitioner, you must know what and what not to take footages of. The live coverage of the incident was obstruction to justice. The media should know when to cross the borderline. Their coverage on the capture of Mendoza’s brother only aggravated the tension inside the bus.

President Noynoy was himself a picture of his government’s passivity in incidents like this. His statements were all too late to alleviate the battered image of the Philippines. This is a test of his governance and ability to rule. His passive attitude towards this incident somehow sends a message across. He is a raw leader in need of more exposure to national threats and issues.

One hostage-taking incident proved to be enough to distort our country’s image. The hostage-taking incident was not the fault of Rolando Mendoza alone. The unskilled hands of the SWAT team and the MPD should also carry half the burden of betraying the Philippines’ image in the international limelight. The media’s obstruction of justice in the immediate scene only made matters worse.

This is one incident the world will find hard to forget. It was a showcase of a media too unethical and a government’s ineffective governance.

Go or No to Science Blogging

An article on the Nat Geo website was like a science textbook. The only difference is that it is published, not by a printing press but published in the world wide web. There has been a noticeable trend of journalism being practiced via the internet and surprisingly, it centers on science and its recent developments.

In Airships: A Second Age, engineers are now reported to release their designs of new aircrafts. This recent news about aircraft innovation and other related scientific topics are fresh cuts for journalists. Although websites like ScienceBlogs show a rather surprising number of journalists-turned-bloggers, this number is relatively small in comparison to journalists who stay out of science blogging.

Journalists who venture into the realm of science journalism encounter more problems than they did when they were ordinary journalists. In an article found in ScienceBlogs, a one-liner captures the struggle of journalists with experience in blogging about science. Our lack of tech support, combined with our lack of paychecks and a total blackout on any and all forms of communication has demoralized the entire community. For some journalists, this poses doubt whether writing about science is a good idea. Should we leave science writing to scientists who blog about recent scientific research and progress? Despite these problems, a blogger of ScienceBlogs gave readers some reasons why blogging about science is a hard task to stop. Readers of ScienceBlogs has shown importance to those few journalists who write about science. Journalists can easily find higher-paying writing jobs that give twice as much training as science blogging. As journalists, it is on rare instances where we find ourselves being given such importance by our readers.

Whether we should go for or avoid the realm of writing about science remains unanswered. As a future journalist, I can still see journalism flourishing in the world of science and technology. Like any other job, being a writer or blogger for science entails problems. Low and late pay and other occasional work-related problems are all part of a job and these are all part of journalism. The tip is to find ways on how to put a stop to these problems inside the office or workplace, not to avoid and leave science blogging to scientists. Journalists should find ways to survive as science bloggers and keep blogs about science alive and kicking.

Science and Journalism

Should journalists be concerned with writing scientific articles? This question led the writer to enumerate ways on how to hook the attention of readers. To be in a fast changing, modern world, journalists are challenged to keep their readers focused on reading their articles. “Understanding the audience, determining the message, deciding on strategies, and measuring success” were tips given to keep easily-distracted readers engaged in a piece of writing.

Scientific researches are now viewed apathetically in the United States and are not given enough funds. People are less interested in science findings and the media is seen as one of the factors that cause it. Here is one obstacle faced by writers interested in writing scientific articles. How do you create a scientific article when sources (researches, case studies and experiments) are not well-funded and thus give substandard data? The article “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media” poses a challenge to media practitioners, specifically journalists. The media must verify sources and be cautious of substandard sources to reap an informative science article as a result.

"Independent science coverage is not just endangered, it's dying," Robert Lee Hotz’ words summarized the struggle of the media to write articles related to science. There has been decline in the number of journalists writing science articles. Blogging has helped solve this problem. Scientists find themselves relating science to laypeople in blogs.

Journalists and science writing are reaching out to a larger crowd through the help of blogging but are also plagued by problems. Science journalism has a future. The tips are for journalists to keep people hooked and interested, verify sources and do not be hesitant to use the internet and blogging to write about science.

Writing Tips

Silverblatt’s interview raised an important point that most interviewers fail to do: “mirror” their interviewee. To journalists, we are almost always focused on getting information that we neglect to know the story behind the interviewee. Silverblatt also mentions the role of reading. From the article, I gleaned an idea that conducting an interview is like reading. To know how a story ends, we must be engrossed in it.

“Clear thinking becomes clear writing”. This statement summarizes the idea of Zinsser. I like how he used examples of a “cluttered” writing to emphasize the necessity to make a concise writing. Through his examples, he magnified writing as a hard task that must be given much thought. How a writer picks the right words and the way he glues them into sentences may or may not interest the reader.

The blog post A Farewell to Science has tackled the importance of blogging. Some media practitioners do not consider the world of blogging as a media form. In this blog post, it is stated that “scientists and journalists share some common ethical principles: transparency, authenticity and truth-telling”. Most people regard blogging as merely a way of ranting but it is related to the media in the way it disseminates information, whether scientific or not.

By looking through these articles, a journalist who writes about a scientific topic must be a good interviewee, read about the topic he wants to cover, be transparent with facts and be concise. It takes a whole lot of discipline to write a scientific article. The problem starts with how to gather information and how to verify them and ends with finding out how to create an interesting article using this information.

Yes, Scientific Stuff Can Be Interesting

I find Realities in RP Science to be informative. It was a lengthy read but is kept interesting by not using technical and scientific terms that can confuse a reader. I like the way the article was straightforward, a noticeable fact seen through the reasons (brain drain, excessive red tape) that were given right after a brief introduction of the topic. The ending paragraph summarized his key points.

The second article was more technical. It employed a simple, straightforward writing style like the first article but was more difficult to understand. The word genome may not be readily understood by all readers and so leads to difficult comprehension of ideas presented. If I were to rewrite the article, I would try to omit not-so-useful sentences and would stick to using simple words to prevent unclear ideas.

The third article, From Museum Basement, a `New’ Dinosaur, was both interesting and informative. It was shorter than the other two articles but it conveyed concise ideas that gave it clarity. It was successful in delivering scientific news through use of simple terms and language.

The article about the vocal range of animals was light but was full of fresh information. It did not only enumerate the facts about animals and their vocal ranges but was able to support this info with research.

Here are the articles' links. :)

Realities in RP Science

Human genetic variation — Science’s ‘Breakthrough of the Year’

From Museum Basement, a `New’ Dinosaur

For Male Finches, Range Comes With Muscle